“President Donald Trump will meet with the chief executives of technology companies including Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc on Monday as the White House looks to the private sector for help in cutting government waste and improving services,” David Shepardson reports for Reuters.

“White House officials said on a conference call on Friday that the administration believed there was an “economic opportunity” to save up to $1 trillion over 10 years by significantly cutting government information technology costs, reducing government costs through improved IT, leveraging government buying power and cutting fraud across government agencies,” Shepardson reports. “The meeting with nearly 20 chief executives comes as the White House pushes to shrink government, cut federal employees and eliminate regulations. Many business executives are eager to work with the new administration as they face numerous regulatory and other policy issues.”

“In May, Trump created an ‘American Technology Council,’ the latest in a series of efforts to modernize the U.S. government. He signed a separate order in March to overhaul the federal government and tapped son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner to lead a White House Office of American Innovation to leverage business ideas and potentially privatize some government functions,” Shepardson reports. “Following Trump’s June 1 decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk and Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger stepped down from White House advisory panels. White House officials said the dispute had little impact and that they had to turn away tech leaders from Monday’s event because of lack of space.”

“On Monday, the Office of American Innovation, a Kushner-led group inside the West Wing, will conduct the first of many brainstorming sessions with about 18 CEOs and two-dozen more business experts,” Jonathan Easley reports for The Hill. “The White House also plans to unveil a new technology council.”

“Trump and Vice President Pence will swing by the working sessions on Monday. Kushner, his wife Ivanka Trump and most of Trump’s senior aides and advisers will participate,” Easley reports. “So too will Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney.”

“Among the other CEOs who will be present: Ajay Banga of MasterCard, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Ginni Rometty of IBM, Brian Krzanich of Intel and Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, a Trump supporte,” Easley reports. “The White House has outlined three goals for American Innovation Office’s IT overhaul. Chief among them is modernizing the government’s digital capabilities so that citizens can receive federal services that are ‘as good as what they receive in the private sector.'”

“The second goal is aimed at finding efficiencies to reduce government spending on IT by $1 trillion over the next 10 years… by leveraging the full bargaining power of the U.S. government as the world’s largest buyer of data platforms; and by rooting out fraud and waste through machine learning programs utilized by the major credit card companies,” Easley reports. “The third focus of the group will be cyber-secruty and ensuring the government’s internal data is adequately protected.”

Tim Cook proved himself a supply chain genius during his time at Apple under Steve Jobs.

Not a fan of his decisions as CEO, but he moved Apple from a very expensive and inefficient supply chain to best in the business.

Our government could use some of that. The problem is often not that the civil servants are inept, but that they are constrained by stupid rules imposed by politicians in the executive or legislative branches.

I supervised civil servants, contractors and military staff back during my time in the US Army. What direct experience do you have?

I found our civil servants to mostly be highly skilled, dedicated, reliable, reasonable and generally underpaid compared to their private sector equivalents. The GS civilians were unionized and we had a shop steward working in my department, and he was reasonable and easy to work with.

I personally do not think Government employees should be unionized, but I had no problems supervising them. I know it is Republican Doctrine to bitch about civil servants, but the hypocrisy is interesting. Republicans claim to “love our troops” but bitch about them when they become civil servants or the employees of government corporations. The US Postal Service, for example, employs more veterans than any other employer in America.

Neil Armstrong and all the other astronauts were government employees. The internet you are seeing this on is the scion of DARPA- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Hubble Space Telescope was a government project. Edwin Armstrong- who invented FM radio was a Major in the US Army. The list is endless.
Actually, most of the great feats of modern humanity were done by or sponsored by government.
Reagan was a senile old man.

GoeB

Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - 12:43 am ·

Reagan was in no way senile. The FAKE MEDIA started during his presidency. He was a GREAT president …

Ah, the US Post Office and their Civil Servants… I’ll grant you, there may be some good, honest, hard working people within that establishment, but LOOK who they work FOR! My local post office has four registers, and on one visit, they were only manning two, when the line of customers went out the room, into the adjacent lobby and out the door. As we glacially waited for the line to advance, we got to look at the big ole school clock hanging on the wall in the post office room as the minutes, upon minutes, upon minutes passed by. I guess people complained about the wait time, so, being “government”, what did they do for the next time? Did they initiate calling for someone in the back to come up and help man the unused registers until the line shrinks to a few people? Nope! They removed the clock from the wall so you couldn’t stare and watch the minutes of your life pass by! Democrats, good intentions that only big government can do, fails because of idiot politicians and bureaucrats!

I can go on with my own personal anecdotes with encounter with the IRS call center support staff and a Social Security Agency staffer. As a small business owner, dealings with the state tax collection agency, as well as, the city government. And don’t even get me started on that Obamacare garbage!

There also came good from private sector. The talk of astronauts and the Hubble space telescope, but don’t forget, the origins of powered flight began with two bicycle shop owners on the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, NC and not some massive government undertaking with a 29,000 page bill filled in by lawyers and bureaucracy… that would come later, once government got involved. And your iPads and iPhones, an extension of Apple, whose mainstay, the computer for the rest of us began in some geniuses garage with the aid of a friend. And back in the industrial revolution where you had your John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan and Thomas Edison, they had vision, not a bill passed by Congress that became law when signed by the president. And didn’t JP Morgan help out the government’s US Treasury in its time of need during an economic downturn in the early 1890’s?

Not everything that glitters is because the US Government and it’s dedicated civil service workforce are involved.

I have fairly wide experience dealing with government employees across Texas. It is both false and demeaning to suggest that they are any less hard-working than employees in the private sector. Most of them are in their jobs because they genuinely desire to serve the public. To do so, they tolerate working conditions and compensation that would be unacceptable for similarly-qualified private workers.

Yes, they often have fairly generous benefits, but that is to compensate for having smaller current paychecks than their private-sector counterparts. Governments like to kick the fiscal can down the road by paying less in current wages and more in deferred compensation. Then, all too often, they jerk the pensions that the workers have already earned away when it is too late for the workers to reclaim the work they performed in exchange for just a broken promise.

Government workers cannot strike, and in many places they cannot even bargain collectively. So most of their unions in most jurisdictions are necessarily far less powerful than the unions in (for example) the auto industry. Union security is just a convenient excuse for cheapskates who expect to receive a dollar’s worth of government services for fifty cents in tax payments.

Your cited articles says that in 2010, Federal workers were paid on average 2% more than private workers, but their salaries have been frozen ever since. For professional workers like lawyers and doctors, federal employees make 23% less than their private counterparts; state employees make even less. Government upper management with comparable responsibilities isn’t even paid in the same order of magnitude as corporate executives.

To repeat, nobody goes into public service to get rich (except grafters). They are motivated by other rewards… as was President Reagan himself, of course. I doubt that he was including himself among the ranks of the unqualified who can’t make it in business. Claiming that nobody qualified was working in government was just a rhetorical flourish, like claiming that government is not the solution to a wide range of social problems (like policing, judging, homeland defending, etc.).

Seriously, if you look at the biggest problem the government has throughout is bloated vastness, its document management. I don’t think the words document management are even in Tim Cook’s pipeline. The government doesn’t need speakers, and wireless headphones, and watches, and expensive computers, that’s consumer electronics.

The government needs systems that can streamline complex workflows, and that’s going to fall into Microsoft and IBM’s bailiwick, more than Apple.

I guess Tim could wax on about diversity and iTunes saving the government money or something.

Good intentions can bite you in the ass. Canada’s previous conservative government tried to do exactly this, trying to cut costs, etc, etc by consolidating various department IT resources into a single department that would offer shared services across the entire country.

Think of it as states being forced to give up much of their powers and autonomy to the federal government. You can guess what happened next.

The result has been a bloated mess more expensive and wasteful than what we had before, massive cost overruns and failed projects (e.g. trying to move all departments to a single managed email system), and centralized servers whose sysadmins take a month and unbelievable amount of red tape to get a damn firewall rule change done, never mind get additional servers provisioned (several months to half a year. If you’re lucky). Several departments have gotten exemptions because Shared Services was costing them too much time and money (read: tax dollars), and putting national security at risk.

The main problem with the goverment systems is that not everyone is on the same page. There is no central cyberfirewall in use, no central database or even a common OS. thetheloniousmas is so off base with he remarks. Having Microsoft is the main reason the goverment systems are in the state they are now. Because it’s so dam expensive to upgrade windows. That in it’s self is a big budget hit. IBM has also cut Their IT costs in half converting to Mac’s from PC’s. Never the less what ever OS and system they choose it must be universal to all government agencies, cost effective, easy to keep current, meet the job task requirements and above all stand up to current cyber attacks.

We could improve the efficiency of government significantly by getting the petty hands of Congress out of the business of the executive.

When individual members essentially sell votes at the price of little pet findings or limitations on spending they hamstring the ability of the agencies of government from operating efficiently.

For example, a former Congressman (the idiot Jay Dickey, yes he was a Republican- go figure) put a rider in a bill years ago that forbids the CDC from studying gun violence as a public health issue. The CDC is the Primary government agency charged with handling these kinds of things and they are forbidden to use one red cent of tax money to study the issue. Not make policy- just study the issue. Thank you gun lobby. He also put in a bill that forbids any study that would destroy an embryo.

This is just tinkering around the fringes and without a massive commitment with massive amounts of dollars – $$$BILLIONS spent with every agency, gov department, industry subcontractor…and his dog – on board, it’s doomed to just waste resources that are, today, pitifully short of adequate.
Oh to be a fly on the wall in those back room discussions.

Just returned from a trip to Savannah and a drive down to New Orleans and I’ve never seen the like of roads with potholes big enough to swallow the camper van unless you straddle the centreline. Infrastructure isn’t just IT

Not My president. Ever. I do not use those two words in the same sentence. I respect the office- but not him. It is he who doesn’t respect the office- or hardly anything else. Horrific nightmare. ITMFA.